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by Kablob, mylordshesacactus



Series: Star Trek: Challenger [5]
Category: Star Trek
Genre: Alien Bureaucracy, Alien Culture, First Contact, Gen, Time Travel, technical difficulties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:08:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21588139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kablob/pseuds/Kablob, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylordshesacactus/pseuds/mylordshesacactus
Summary: 1.05 | Challenger struggles with the limitations of their technology as the crew attempts to make first contact with the pre-warp civilization of Tidrion V. Meanwhile, Esther Hasdai investigates a nearby temporal anomaly.
Series: Star Trek: Challenger [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1439929
Comments: 28
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

[X](https://youtu.be/FpdxvL61zr8?list=LLtCjrYmG1qqxEIjzhIwysBA)

**Captain’s Log, September 7th, 2154**

We really do owe one to _Discovery._ Having accidentally pawned off the asteroid-cluster mission onto our sister ship, _Challenger_ is moments from arrival at the as-of-yet uncontacted planet Tidrion V.

Several months ago a civilian vessel intercepted a broadcasting probe containing atomic ratios, a number system, simple pictures, and what Starfleet eventually recognized as space coordinates.

We sent out enough of those probes ourselves, over the years. We know what a first-contact probe looks like.

There’s an excitement and a sense of purpose in the air that we haven’t felt since the day we launched. The crew knows we’ve just found someone else’s _Voyager_ probe.

By Vulcan standards, we should not have contacted them until they had at least managed a single successful warp flight, but we’re not Vulcans. The Tidrions may not have warp capability yet; but they sent a little robot out into the universe, trying to tell us who they are.

For humanity, that’s reason enough. In a few moments, we will leave warp, and see what awaits us.

**Captain’s Log, September 9th, 2154**

First contact with Tidrion V has begun. For now, _Challenger_ remains parked a non-confrontational distance away from the home planet, well within range of orbital sensors and telescopes but not so near as to make hostilities from either side an immediate threat.

We have broadcast, in many forms, a response to the standard first-contact series. The same basic information which we received in their probe, minus Earth’s coordinates; Starfleet no longer believes including such information is safe.

I cannot disagree with the sentiment. We know, now, that not all neighbors are friendly and many have us outgunned; and I am grateful it was an Earth ship that intercepted their probe, and not Klingons. But I also mourn it. There was a beauty and a courage in that old good-faith approach, and I fear for humanity’s future if we choose to leave it entirely behind.

...Computer, delete the last forty-five seconds.

Esther—that is, Lieutenant-Commander Hasdai—and Ensign Sandoval are busily scanning all planetary transmissions to get a feel for the languages and communications frequencies used by the population. Hailing frequencies are open; _Challenger_ has been painted by satellites, telescopes and orbital radar so many times they have to know we’re here.

For now, we are restraining ourselves to only replying to direct transmissions. We will allow the Tidrions to decide the nature and pace of first contact.

**Captain’s Log, September 10th, 2154**

First contact with Tidrion V continues to move apace. Once the planet sent a recognisable transmission in our direction, we were free to introduce ourselves. _Challenger_ is near a fever pitch with excitement.

The planetary community of Tidrion V is still warlike and divided, not unlike Earth in the early 21st century. However, also much like our own planet’s history, they share a wonder for space travel. Transmissions across the planet have increased by at least five hundred percent since our arrival, and most of the activity is not between government centers.

They are fascinated by our ability to “speak” their language, though we have explained our automatic translation process—it was imperative that we do so, because the universal translator is far from perfect and we don’t dare risk a fatal mistranslation. We have shared a great deal of data, most of it cultural but some including in-depth scans of their solar system that they would normally have struggled to obtain.

This planet is in a fascinating stellar neighborhood; as a gesture of good faith, the Tidrions have given us permission to send out smallcraft and study some of the anomalies in the area. In truth, they seem amused by how fascinating we find the anomalies. They have shared much of their knowledge of the phenomena, and warned us in particular of one such anomaly that they view as highly dangerous. We will investigate, and share our findings; but we will certainly do so with caution.

**Captain’s Log, Supplemental**

All the dominant cultures of Tidrion V, we have learned, place great emphasis on face-to-face communication. They share very little else in common, but this fact is absolute.

At the moment, such a meeting is not possible; a brief scan of their planet set off nearly every alarm in the geophysics lab, and we have no doubt our natural environment would be just as deadly to the Tidrions. They seem perfectly amenable to this situation, and assure us that given the circumstances, direct video communication is more than acceptable.

**Captain’s Log, September 12th, 2154**

We have suspended all study of the mid-system anomaly. Based on our preliminary long-distance scans, and the observations shared by the Tidrions, we believe it to be chronometric in nature, but that will have to wait.

Our entire Science staff has spent the past 48 hours attempting to make a simple video call.

**Captain’s Log, September 13th, 2154**

No change in video call status.

**Captain’s Log, September 14th, 2154**

This is getting ridiculous.

* * *

“All right.” Tisarr’s tail, the only part of her visible through the open floor hatches and widely-strewn cables on the bridge, twitched. “Try it now.”

Esther took a long breath. There was no conceivable reason why this shouldn’t work. Her entire department had gone over every line of code they’d been sent, created a partition to replicate the video software used by the Tidrions, and recreated the system perfectly. 

They’d even checked to make sure the bridge cameras were turned on _and_ plugged in.

She went over the transmission coordinates one last time, hit the confirmation key, and nodded across the bridge to Atsa. He closed his eyes and pressed a button on his console to connect.

The viewscreen went from standby-grey to black, and Ester held her breath.

With a mild beeping tone, an error message flashed on the screen.

_“WHY?!”_

Matos sighed, rubbing her forehead at Esther’s scream. “Not now, please.”

“There is no conceivable explanation for this!” Esther exclaimed, gesturing wildly at the error code. “None! It should be working! _It’s the exact same program!_ ”

“M’bee,” said Tisarr, voice muffled by the floor plates; after a moment she crawled backwards out of the floor, spit out the wrench in her mouth, and tried again. “Maybe,” she said, “it is a fundamental hardware incompatibility? It could be our fault,” she translated.

Esther shook her head sharply. “Not your fault. Your people have pulled off miracles lately and there’s only so much you can change without blowing up the ship. Maybe if...nah, because we tried...I need a rubber duck,” she decided, feeling slightly hysterical. “Preferably _several_ rubber ducks.”

Matos held up a hand.

“What you need,” she said, “is to clear your head. Ensign Sandoval will coordinate with your team and put together a report of everything we’ve tried; the Tidrions may have more ideas, and if nothing else, they will have a different perspective. I want you to take a shuttle and investigate that temporal anomaly, before you give yourself an aneurysm trying to get our video software to mimic primitive wireless connections.”

“Captain,” Esther protested. Yes, all right, she was a little dramatic, but this was a _challenge_. Being pulled off it was cruel, whether Matos intended it that way or not. She was being banished from her own project because she hadn’t been able to figure it out.

Matos raised an eyebrow, but her smile was understanding. “Esther,” she countered. “Do you _not_ want to personally investigate a stable, within-system temporal anomaly?”

Esther opened her mouth to explain that she was missing the point, then closed it.

“...This is a very ineffective punishment,” she warned her captain.

“You’re not being _punished,_ Esther.” Matos sounded amused. “You’ve been working on this problem nonstop for two days. You need space and time and to focus on something else. We’re _all_ stuck in a rut. I agree that whatever the issue is, it almost certainly has to do with your department and not Engineering; which means we need you fresh and creative, not spinning your wheels in the mud. Take a shuttle, pack a lunch, come home, go to bed. Start again in the morning.”

Esther, who was not remotely too proud to admit when she was beaten so long as admitting it meant she got to scan temporal anomalies instead of sobbing into a computer bank, sprang to her feet with a sharp salute and backpedalled off the bridge before anyone involved could change their minds.

* * *

“Science officer’s log, September 14th, 2154,” Esther said as she tapped commands into the shuttle console. “Approaching the temporal anomaly, standby.”

Nobody, including Esther, trusted Esther to pilot her own shuttle. Aleksi had volunteered as her pilot, probably because he was as desperate to get the hell off the bridge as everyone else. Being the senior helmsman came with perks, chief among them that he took precedence on small-craft privileges unless ordered otherwise by someone higher up his chain of command.

Esther liked him. Well, _most_ people liked him, but Esther specifically appreciated that under the nervous exterior there was a real flyboy in Aleksi Lehtonen.

“ETA five minutes, Esther,” he chirped over the comms. Esther finished setting up the close-range scans, locked in the programming, and let herself into the cockpit.

“See anything yet?” She vaulted over the back of the copilot’s chair, ruffling his hair before settling cross-legged in the bucket seat and buckling her harness. “Ghost pirates are traditional.”

Aleksi blew hard at his own forehead, tossing a chunk of blonde hair back out of the way. “It should be right...there. Two o’clock, off the starboard bow.”

“Thar she blows,” Esther muttered under her breath, peering into the blackness. Failing ghostly space pirates, she’d settle for some kind of glowing, pulsing, amorphous blob.

“It’s invisible,” Aleksi said helpfully. “Though we _do_ actually have a harpoon gun in the weapons locker.”

“Flying by sensors? Not bad at this range, you’re good,” said Esther, before blinking. “They actually _listened_ to me?”

“Wait, _you’re_ the one who—of course you are.” Esther nodded, acknowledging that it had in fact been very silly of Aleksi to think it would have been anyone else’s idea to stock harpoon guns in the small-craft weapons lockers.

The comm crackled, and Atsa’s voice came over the speakers. “Okay, Ishmael, I’ll bite— _why_ do we have harpoon guns in the shuttlecraft?” 

Esther was now more focused on the rapid countdown on her display. “Thought they might come in handy someday,” she said absently. “And they’re technically chemical-propellant self-securing anchor points for survival situations. The cables have the greatest tensile strength of any flexible material known to science. They’re for rigging bridges, climbing or descending rock faces, moving heavy equipment, or in case we have to kill a whale. Where _is_ this thing…”

“About half a kilometer out,” said Aleksi, shaking his head and pointing. “Is it...normal that it’s invisible to the naked eye? In sims, weird things in space are usually glowing.”

Esther wiggled her hand beside her eyes. “Eh, there’s no reason it _wouldn’t_ be. Not all forms of energy emit visible light. You’ve got it on sensors, flyboy?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t _ma’am_ me, Lehtonen, Atsa’s a bad influence on you and I will be having words with him.”

Atsa cleared his throat over the comms. “The captain says to focus.”

Esther saluted the comm pickup. “Have you got these readings on the viewscreen?”

After a slight pause, the response came. “In a manner of speaking. The viewscreen is actually in seventeen parts right now, Tisarr’s taking the possibility of a hardware malfunction seriously. But you’re transmitting and we can read you.”

“Well,” Aleksi reassured him. “That’s what matters.”

“The Tidrions’ data is _incredibly_ accurate,” Esther murmured, watching the shuttle’s little scanners paint her a picture of the anomaly. “I know they lost a few dozen probes to this thing, probably flung them fifty thousand years into the future before they worked out its boundaries—”

“Which we are staying at least five hundred feet back from at all times,” Aleksi reminded her. As if for some reason he thought Esther might do something _reckless._ The gall. The implication. 

“—but there’s actually not much more about the structure we can learn from passive sensors. Remind me to tell their scientists that I’d like to compare our scanning technology when we get a chance, I feel like we could learn a lot from each other. Beginning active scanning protocol… now.”

The shuttle’s sensors were nothing compared to the sensor suite back on _Challenger,_ but at this range they could do the job well enough. Esther sat back to watch as the array cycled through multiple spectrums one by one.

“Damn! We got something _interesting_ there on electromagnetics. Can you bring us around the other side? I want to see if we can create that reaction again, maybe strengthen it by agitating the chroniton particles first. I’ve never seen this kind of interaction between a temporal anomaly and an electrostatic field before.” She paused. “ _Challenger,_ what do you think about trying to hit it with a harpoon gun?”

There was a pregnant pause.

Atsa, voice perfectly professional, reported, “The captain says no.”

“Worth a shot.” Esther unbuckled her harness, climbing back out of the cockpit. “Let me know when we’re in position, flyboy, I want to fine-tune the scanning parameters!”

The chroniton scanning field had, indeed, agitated the anomaly—that confirmed there was some kind of temporal fuckery going on. But there was something very odd about the electrostatic aspect, and Esther was a big fan of that sort of thing. The Tidrions had a lot of data about this anomaly, which was to be expected; but their sensors couldn’t detect chronitons, which explained why they had never recorded any unusual electromagnetic readings.

She frowned as Aleksi put them in position for the second scan. There was a reading there, if she could just clear it up. Very carefully, she put one finger on the slider and began adjusting the signal. Nearly there...nearly…

There was a flash of white.


	2. Chapter 2

“Whoa!”

Aleksi’s copilot was, against  _ very _ clear Starfleet safety regulations, out of her shock harness and wandering the cabin area. He cringed as the viewscreen flared with white light, lunging across the control panel to polarize hull plating before diving back into position to grip the controls and brace for the shockwave.

It was...anticlimactic.

Anticlimactic was good! Aleksi  _ loved _ anticlimactic. Especially when the climax was a wavefront of raw energy that had almost consumed his ship. He was  _ absolutely _ fine with it having no apparent effect on them. He was even more fine with the way the radiation detectors inside the hull continued to  _ not _ detect radiation.

“Esther, what  _ was _ that?” It hadn’t done any harm, at least not that he could find. Tapping the audio uplink and hoping Atsa was still there, he reported, “No apparent damage, nothing on hull sensors. Maintaining hull polarization just in case. Holding position relative to anomaly. Esther, what does the anomaly look like?”

No answer.

That didn’t make sense; she couldn’t have gotten hurt in the blast, he told his pounding heart as he twisted to look behind him and then frantically punched up internal hull monitors and the medical chip embedded in away team suits The blast hadn’t even nudged their shuttle and internal sensors would have noticed if there’d been some kind of electrical feedback.

“Atsa?” he said, fear hard in his throat. “You still there?”

“Of course I am.” Atsa’s voice made him go weak with relief, despite the worry in it. “Lieutenant, status? Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know, one minute. Esther, this isn’t funny, tell me you’re okay!”

There was no reading on either of his screens. And not the red flatlining he feared, either; Esther’s medical chip was a single grey loading signal with the error message that no such device existed to connect to, and internal sensors showed only one life-form in the shuttlecraft.

He frowned, finally decoupling his harness and standing to peer through the cockpit doors.

“...Esther?”

* * *

The searing white light faded into dancing sunspots as Esther squeezed her eyes shut several times in rapid succession, her vision finally settling on a large, open white room. 

It was busy, but not rushed; the calmly bustling atmosphere of a well-oiled machine where everyone knew exactly what they were meant to be doing and had just enough time to get there comfortably. Everyone was wearing a color-coded variation of the same mostly-black uniform; there were a lot of humans, but just as many Andorians and, on second thought, even more Vulcans than humans. Some Caitians.

And a  _ lot _ of species Esther had never even seen before. She jumped as a pair of Klingons walked in through an automatic door, heads together, examining something on a handheld device. 

None of the others in the room even looked up. They were all wearing the same uniform.

Without thinking, Esther grinned. Then, after thinking for a few moments, she decided she should probably be less calm about this.

“Aaaaah,” she tried, since a lifetime as a sci-fi nerd informed her screaming was the appropriate response.

A young female Andorian, holding a padd and looking anxious, hurried up. “Hello, ma’am,” she said, flustered but polite. “I’m certain you have many questions, and we’re here to assist you. If you can please step off the temporal transportation pad, to make room for the next arrivals, I’ll escort you to our waiting area.”

Esther wasn’t so fascinated that she was going to make some poor rank-and-file girl’s day harder, so she took exactly three steps forward until she’d stepped off the glowing white pad. Once she’d done that she planted her feet and counted questions off on her fingers. “Who’s we, waiting for what, where am I, how did I get here, and have you got a name?”

“Ensign Sylit Sh’rhothen, ma’am,” the Andorian replied promptly. “Welcome aboard the Federation timeship USS  _ Morai. _ ”

Esther glanced around the room again.

“...Temporal Investigations?” she guessed.

Sylit brightened. “Temporal Affairs, ma’am. You  _ are _ post-Xindi war, then! That’s good. I’d hate to have to get involved in something like  _ that _ on a Monday. The Investigations department is enforcement and regulation, protecting the timestream from intentional interference. The  _ Morai _ takes a slightly different role, more exploratory than punitive. Except for at the moment, of course.”

Esther went still, then made herself relax. “Yeah?” she said, in a forced conversational tone as she let Sylit lead her out of the ‘temporal transporter’ room and down a short, brightly-lit corridor. “You’re punitive at the moment?”

“What?” The young Andorian’s stricken expression was a relief, actually. “No, no no! I’m so sorry, I—this is actually my first day in this part of the ship. Orientation isn’t as prestigious as On-Site Observation but I feel more useful here.”

“Congrats,” said Esther, heart starting to settle back into a normal rhythm. “You’re doing great.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Um, anyway, no, we’re not doing Investigations work, I just meant, well. It’s a little like scanning asteroid clusters was in your day. It’s not as much fun, but  _ someone _ has to end up assigned to timestream cleanup.”

“Are you…” Esther tried to contain her laughter for the sake of the poor girl’s feelings. “Did they put you lot on  _ quantum parking enforcement? _ ”

Sylit opened her mouth, antennae twitching, then closed it with a sigh.

“Well,” she muttered. “When you put it like that, ma’am. Here we are! Room 404, waiting facility for the temporally displaced.”

She tapped a pressure pad, and a set of doors slid open in a soft rush of air. Esther followed her into what was possibly the most boring waiting room she’d ever seen in her life. There weren’t even any cheap, tacky flower prints or anything on the walls. Just blank white, with pastel chairs scattered around the room. A few fake plants. At least there were no old-fashioned TVs playing infomercials for dental surgery in a never-ending loop.

“You know,” she pointed out. “There’s usually magazines or something.”

“I’m working on it, ma’am!” Sylit had crossed to a slot in the wall at the center of the room, scanning her palm on a wall-mounted device. “Where and when exactly did you come from?”

“Hill Valley, California, 1985.”

Brightly but without the slightest hint of sarcasm, Sylit smiled and said, “It’s a good thing I don’t work in Temporal Affairs, where the respective time-travel-based classical entertainment of all Federation species are for some reason the most popular selections for weekly crew-wide media nights. Otherwise, I might have heard that joke before.”

This girl was good, and Esther kind of wanted to steal her. “In my defense, you said it was your first day.”

“Fair enough, ma’am.”

“Tidrion V, September of 2154,” said Esther, the picture of contrition.

“Thank you, ma’am.” She repeated the specs to the wall device, which spat out a thin padd. Sylit picked it up, glancing at the readout. “Oh! That’s excellent. We can eliminate the Janeway Factor with almost ninety-eight percent certainty! That’s about as high as you can reasonably get without p-hacking. There’s always  _ some _ risk of Janeway involvement, after all.” 

She handed it to Esther with just a hint of confident flourish. Good. It was a nice change. You could always trust a two-hundred-year-old joke to break the ice.

“You get enough, uh...guests...to make it worth having a whole setup like this?” she asked, gesturing to the waiting room. It wasn’t  _ crowded, _ per se, but it wasn’t near-empty either.

Sylit made a face. “You’d be surprised. Timestream cleanup is all the little incidents that don’t require a full response team but still need to be handled. Most people only hear about us when something goes so egregiously wrong that we  _ can’t _ catch it seamlessly, and there’s enough of those as it is. I mean, in your era alone there’s all of Captain Archer’s nonsense, and Commander T’Pol is actually—never mind.”

Esther considered pressing that little gem, but didn’t want to scare the ensign away so fast. Instead she glanced at the padd, which was patiently flashing a cue to scan her thumbprint. Curious, she allowed it, and found a bog-standard entertainment padd with the date of her last ‘departure’ at the top of the screen.

Interesting. She scrolled through a few dozen entries in rapid succession, watching the titles and release dates until she figured out the pattern and made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat.

“It’s timelocked,” Sylit confirmed, sounding almost but not quite apologetic. “Specially keyed to your biometric signature. You understand.”

“No music from the future? You people are so  _ boring. _ ”

“It’s the Temporal Prime Directive, ma’am!” Her escort looked scandalized. “It’s not  _ boring. _ It’s the philosophical core of our existence!”

“And it’s  _ no fun. _ You’re a terrible minion, I wanted to know which sequels to avoid. Why is it always the odd numbers?”

Sylit glanced around the room, then leaned in anxiously.

“I can’t tell you that,” she whispered. “Temporal Cold War. We actually use it as a sort of canary in a coal mine and that’s all I’m allowed to say.”

Esther beamed at her. Encouraged, Sylit smiled back and straightened into a more polished tone.

“We apologize for the delay and acknowledge the irony, ma’am, but there will be a bit of a wait. Temporal reintegration is safe and reliable but—”

Unable to help herself, Esther butted in. “Am I temporally de-integrated? I don’t like the sound of that, personally. I like my temporals as integrated as possible unless I get superpowers out of it.”

“You don’t get superpowers,” Sylit said hastily.  _ “Please _ let us re-integrate you when the time comes.”

Ah, beleaguered ensigns. They learned so fast. Esther, denied the possibility of going rogue and becoming the time-hopping supervillain she was destined to become, settled for miming a pathetic rimshot at the pun.

_ When the time comes. _ It was funny.

“I don’t know how much you remember, ma’am, but you jumped the timestream while scanning an anomaly near Tidrion V. Due to the unique interaction between chroniton particles and the electrostatic field, when the anomaly was agitated...our instruments indicate you were in physical contact with some sort of electrical system at the time? The scanners themselves?”

Esther got the distinct impression she was being chastised. “I wasn’t  _ touching the circuits. _ ”

“Temporal anomalies are tricky,” Sylit reassured her. “The controls would probably have been enough. Anyway, you’ve been flung about nine thousand years into the future of that exact spot, which is unfortunate because it’s the empty vacuum of space. The stability of the spacetime continuum relies on your survival.”

Well, that was flattering at least. Definitely more comforting than the bit about the empty vacuum of space.

“Since this is an obvious chance alteration of the timeline,  _ Morai  _ pulled you in. Your return should be fairly simple, which makes you low-priority in the queue for now. We really do apologize for our inability to do this instantaneously.”

“...No worries.” Esther thumbed through the entertainment padd a little longer before deciding it wasn’t worth it. 

Looking anxious again over her reaction, Sylit hovered a little closer.

“It shouldn’t take more than six hours to clear the queue of high-priority cases,” she said. “In the meantime, I have to remain as your attendant to make sure you don’t...um, talk to any of the others. About anything that would threaten the timestream! You’re allowed to talk, obviously, you’re not prisoners. It’s just, I  _ am _ an Orientation officer, I can’t go around breaking the TPD.”

“No fun at all.”

“And, um, while they’re also access-locked based on your biometric signature, the holodecks are available with a pre-cleared selection of material deemed to not contain any, um...spoilers. If you don’t want to wait and read there’s also a small cafeteria available for those awaiting reintegration.” She pointed helpfully into the next room.

“I’ve actually got— _ Damn.” _ Matos had made a point of reminding Esther to bring a lunch, and she had. Fat lot of good it would do her, tucked under the copilot’s chair in Aleksi’s shuttle. 

After a moment, Esther’s whirling brain caught up to her ears.

“The  _ what? _ ”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is a lovely day in Temporal Affairs and you are a horrible goose.

They did actually end up hitting the cafeteria first. Esther, if nothing else, was  _ phenomenally  _ self-aware as a side effect of having nothing resembling the Earth concept of an insecurity.

Or, as she consistently reminded her beloved minions, anything to be insecure about.

The point was, she knew herself well enough to be certain that once she got within visual range of whatever a holodeck was, poor Sylit was going to have to hit her with a horse tranquilizer to get her away from it again. And she couldn’t geek properly on an empty stomach. Mad science needed energy, as a matter of both self-care and basic physics.

As it happened, she was too enraptured to even care that this young ensign was visibly amused.

“I recognize that effect,” she said, squinting into the little box where another Orientation officer had just ordered a plate of lasagna. “This is some kind of localized version of our matter transporters? Obviously you’ve gotten around the power overhead, if your receiver pads are this small, but that seems like an awful lot of work when you could just have the kitchens connect to the damn window. Have a dumbwaiter or something, holy shit. Or a buffet line. You people get  _ way _ too much funding.”

“There’s no kitchen, ma’am,” said Sylit, trying and failing to hide a smile. “Those aren’t transporters, they’re replicators.”

Esther paused for some time, then offered her escort an aside glance. “You’re fucking with me, kid.”

“I’m not! These are food replicators, they’re standard by the twenty-third—” Sylit’s eyes widened. “By an unspecified point in the future.”

Oh, now  _ that _ was interesting. That was very interesting. That was actually more interesting than the holodeck.

“How do you get that level of precision in matter-energy conversion?” Esther muttered, peering at the device as she poked and prodded the controls. A man wearing phenomenally shiny pants came up to the ‘replicator’ next to theirs, ordered a cheeseburger, cast an odd look in her direction and wandered off again. She ignored him. “That’s an even more ridiculous energy expenditure than the transporters would have been. Just have a kitchen like normal people.”

Sylit’s lips twitched. “This is actually more efficient,” she promised. “The raw matter is much more condensed and thus easier to store, and it can be replaced almost continually with recyclers and simply by harvesting material from space. We have the power reserves to spare, and trying to store individual ingredients on a ship this size, with the kind of diverse nutritional and molecular-structure needs of a Federation crew—”

“Feel free to tell me what the hell a ‘Federation’ is,” Esther pointed out idly, prying off the face of a control panel and peering at the futuristic circuitry. “Continue.”

“A kitchen would be a phenomenal waste of space and energy, and be less reliable than the replicators,” Sylit concluded. “Not to mention the sheer number of people necessary to staff it. The addition of a few more Engineering crewmembers to maintain the replicator system just doesn’t compare.”

Esther, pretty sure she’d worked out how the controls functioned, typed in a long pattern of letters and numbers on the highly impractical touchscreen controls. There was a reason  _ Challenger _ didn’t trust touch controls on anything essential, despite their ubiquity on Earth; good old-fashioned analog input didn’t freeze, crash, or take precious seconds to load in a high-stress situation.

Yes, this was essentially the burger counter, but the point remained. Some buttons wouldn’t kill these people.

Would they? “Note to self,” she said into her padd. “Investigate whether buttons have some interference with temporal integration.”

“What?” said Sylit.

“Nothing, kid. You have industrial replicators too, yeah? Are these fundamentally different somehow?”

“Well, they’re more precise…” The Andorian ensign tried and failed to nudge Esther out of the way and put the replicator back together. “It’s mostly programming. And size, obviously. The food replicators have less power and can’t replicate anything nearly as large or dense, but they’re also much more detailed and have an exponentially higher degree of security failsafes in place.”

“Oh, yeah, those.” Esther tapped a few more buttons. “I think I just disabled them, actually.” She cleared her throat and rapped a knuckle on the replicator. “Enriched plutonium!”

Sylit yelped. The replicator, the safety programming of which Esther hadn’t actually touched, gave a soft chime and politely informed her that her selection did not meet Starfleet guidelines for acceptable nutritional value.

Esther threw a wink over her shoulder at a very pale Andorian.

“So what  _ are _ the restrictions on this thing?” she asked as if nothing notable had happened. Hand pressed over what was presumably the location of her heart, Sylit took a few deep breaths and then moved to Esther’s side.

“They, um...whoo. Sorry. They won’t replicate poisons, or Starfleet uniforms for anyone not a Starfleet officer. These ones are also hardwired not to replicate any technology beyond your natural timezone.”

“Can you replicate a replicator?”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?” Sylit sighed. “No. That’s too complicated for the technology to handle. It might also destroy causality, we’re not sure. We think one of the  _ Enterprise... _ es _...tried _ it, but even  _ we _ can’t figure out what happened to them that week.”

Esther could not call herself anything short of delighted. The implications of this kind of technology were mind-boggling, and the potential dangers even more so. Safety features could be disabled or reversed, the risk of dependence was devastating, but the sheer potential for good edged those factors out—if real protective measures could be put in place.

“I would  _ love _ to know how you got your energy overhead so efficient that molecular synthesizers are more practical than an industrial kitchen, but you won’t tell me,” she said. “You put all this in here just for increased quality of life? That’s insane. I will figure out how those failsafe programs function if it’s the last thing I do, because if they’re as good as you people seem to think they are, we need them.”

“I think it works on some sort of AI system, with hard-coded fallbacks,” said Sylit helpfully. She immediately looked appalled with herself.

“All right. Okay. I got distracted. How does this work? Like if I just say ‘fairy bread’ will it know—”

The replicator whirred for a moment, then gave that same error tone.  _ Item code not recognized,  _ it chimed, somehow apologetic.  _ Please see a replicator maintenance professional to discuss entering this item into the database.  _

“Bullshit,” Esther informed it. “You have no culture. None.” She sighed. “Fine. Fish and chips.”

Muttering under her breath as her order promptly materialized, she was reaching out to take the platter and examine it closely for any signs of molecular bonding between plate and potato when a young woman walked up next to her and cheerfully ordered a pork chop.

After several long minutes of Esther staring blankly into space, Sylit finally, cautiously reached out and tapped her shoulder.

“Ma’am?” she said carefully. “Are you...okay?”

“Ooooh man,” Esther managed after a few tries. “I need to talk to my rabbi.”

* * *

Two hours later, bullied into eating her fish and having recovered from her existential crisis, Esther was finally shown into the holosuite.

She’d been so wrong. This was way better than the food replicators. Holy shit.

“Let’s see.” Sylit stood at the holodeck controls, apparently not trusting Esther with them for some reason. “Cleared for your timezone are...a lot of options, actually. Horse riding...the  _ USS Enterprise _ experience…” As she tabbed through options, the scent of hay and horses vanished abruptly to be replaced by salt spray as they were transplanted to an alarmingly realistic 18th-century sailing ship. “All the Sherlock Holmes stories, Shakespeare…”

“And I can’t get a video call to connect,” Esther said weakly, watching the scenery flicker between forests, deserts, Victorian London, and a trio of cackling witches.

Sylit hesitated, pausing the simulation. “Did you say...Tidrion V?”

“Yeah.” Esther reached out, poking a frozen witch.

Her young guide tapped something into her padd, winced, and tried to hide it. “I see, ma’am. Yes, I...forgot that you haven’t developed the universal visual data homogenization subroutines, yet.”

“Don’t  _ ma’am _ me, minion.” Esther made a mental note to try to invent a subroutine for universal visual data homogenization, as if she wasn’t doing her damnedest already. “What happens at Tidrion V?”

“Nothing,” said Sylit, hastily. This girl was not  _ nearly _ a good enough liar to be working in Temporal Affairs. Esther narrowed her eyes, and the Andorian flinched. “Nothing! And I couldn’t tell you if it did, it’s the Temporal Prime Directive! We  _ can’t _ use knowledge of the future to interfere with the natural unfolding of events.”

“Is there a non-temporal whom dir-what now?” Esther asked, irritated. In theory, she understood the need for caution. In practice...some things, some failures to act, were beyond forgiveness.

“What do you—oh, of course.” Sylit suddenly looked almost charmed despite her nervousness, which only ratcheted Esther’s irritation tighter. “Not  _ yet, _ in your time period.”

Holding back a comment about being condescended to—they had to be at least a few hundred years in the future, the kid probably couldn’t help it, Esther might not be able to either—Esther nevertheless fixed her escort with a Look. After a moment, the Look went from censure to consideration.

A little too casually, Esther asked, “So. When, uh...when does that Temporal Prime Directive get written?”

Sylit raised an eyebrow; her only answer was “An amendment to the core concept of noninterference with the natural, unassisted development of other civilizations and growing cultures was formalized when intentional time travel started to become a viable concept.”

“So,” Esther continued. “Not in my lifetime, then.”

“No, not nearly.” Sylit was starting to look suspicious at the sudden flip back to a conversational tone, and crossed her arms to watch Esther warily.

_ Way too late for that, kid.  _ She would almost have felt apologetic, but, well. Cheating didn’t count when your opponent was from the future, right?

Keeping up her casual tone, Esther went for the kill. “So,” she mused. “Since neither version has been written yet, holding me to it would technically be a violation of my right to natural, unassisted development as a member of a growing culture?”

Sylit opened her mouth, then closed it.

Esther waited and tried not to look too smug.

“...If I promise you that there’s no threat to  _ Challenger _ or any of her crew, will you  _ please  _ leave me alone?”

“Nah. What happens at Tidrion V?”

“I can’t  _ tell _ you that!”

“I’m pretty sure it goes against your regulations to hold me to laws that haven’t been written in my time,” Esther insisted. “You’re stifling my cultural development.”

“If you want to be technical,” Sylit snapped, “Saving your life when you were temporally displaced was interfering with the unassisted flow of the timestream and we shouldn’t have done it.”

“And your regulations considered my case different, and here we are, and I want to know—”

“Fine! Fine! But I have to ask my captain first, because I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about how the TPD works.”

Esther privately thought she was right, but Esther was also pretty sure that no living creature in the galaxy was as good at arguing as she was.

They’d deactivated the holodeck while they bickered over semantics, and Esther rolled her shoulders. “So your captain, are they a science officer?”

Sylit twitched, searching frantically through her padd as she presumably tried to find exemptions to whatever the Prime Directive was. “She is, yes, which is why she’ll hopefully be able to explain to you about the unimpeded timestream.”

“Humanoid, long hair in locs, wearing a Klingon dagger, about yea high? Looks like she’s already got a headache?”

“Except for the last one, yes, that sounds  _ hello Captain! _ ”

“Ensign,” the woman greeted her with a slightly strained smile as Sylit’s sudden attempt to salute sent her padd flying into a wall. Esther, taking a guess at the cause of that strain, picked it up and waved.

“Is there something we can do for you, sir?” Sylit asked, nervous. Her captain sighed.

“I hope not, ensign. I’m just here to follow up on a system alert about one of our guests attempting to replicate  _ plutonium?” _

This time, Esther had the grace to at least make her wave slightly sheepish.

“She was...joking, ma’am,” Sylit explained. “She’s from the twenty-second century. Ah, 2154, NX-03  _ Challenger, _ ma’am.”

The captain’s eyebrows about flew off her forehead. Interesting.

“Esther Hasdai,” Esther introduced herself, holding the extra padd out to the side where a flushing Sylit grabbed it and tucked it close to her chest.

There was just enough of a pause to be noteable before the timeship captain offered a hand.

“...Elvira,” she said, not impolitely. Esther accepted her handshake. “An honor, Lieutenant-Commander. Please don’t terrorize my security department any further.”

Sylit cleared her throat. “Ah, ma’am, while you’re here...We’re having a bit of a  _ situation, _ regarding the Prime Directive?”

“You’ll be here for a while,” Esther warned the captain. “Either of you mind if I pull up one of these Sherlock Holmes stories in the background?”

Elvira, if that was her real name, gave a conciliatory gesture and stepped back through the arch of the holodeck doors, waving Ensign Sylit through them as well. Esther punched a button with her elbow as soon as she could manage it without looking suspicious, and immediately pulled up the historical files on the padd she was holding.

She really  _ would  _ feel bad about this, later. Poor Sylit was so anxious to do well on her first day, and Esther would certainly do everything she could to make sure she hadn’t just ruined the poor kid’s career. But, well, lives could be in the balance here—or maybe they weren’t, the whole point was Esther’s inability to tell either way. 

All Starfleet padds kind of looked the same, and a flustered ensign very rarely thought to check which one she’d just been handed.

“Historical files,” Esther murmured under her breath, fingers flying. “Tidrion V... _ there _ we are.”


	4. Chapter 4

Six minutes and thirty-two seconds later, the holodeck abruptly deactivated again. Esther, who had been relaxing in a projection of a 20th-century Las Vegas casino and considering seeing what the simulation would do if she threw something at a dealer, looked up as innocently as she could manage.

Sylit glared.

“Give it back,” the captain ordered wearily, and Esther produced the ensign’s stolen padd without complaint. For some reason, they didn’t seem inclined to give her borrowed one back, which was only fair.

It had been a very informative six and a half minutes. Esther knew, now, the fate of  _ Challenger _ ’s mission to Tidrion V. It was simultaneously better, and worse, than she had feared.

There was no dramatic breakdown of communication, no spiralling paranoia, no mistakes in translation on either side. Talks simply trickled to a halt as both sides failed to establish video links. With both sides unable to host the other, the Tidrions eventually cooled in their desire for face-to-face contact; they had exchanged images, after all.

Tidrion V assured  _ Challenger _ that there was no need to linger longer just to indulge their sensitivities;  _ Challenger _ heard that assurance as a polite dismissal from their space, and, not wishing to impose, removed itself.

There was no hostile feeling, but no close bond either. Both sides made promises to keep in touch, and set up systems of basic communication; but with no real connection on either side, Earth and Tidrion V were at best aware of one another and content to go their separate ways.

Two years later, Naussican raiders—whatever a Naussican was—made their own attempt at first contact. The Naussican video systems, for whatever reason, were more compatible with the Tidrions’. Real-time face-to-face communication fostered a sense of connection and goodwill that the colder exchange of data with Starfleet never had. It created a bond. It created trust. It created those things right up until the moment the Naussicans that Tidrion V had welcomed into its orbit opened simultaneous fire on seventy-eight capital cities across the planet.

Tidrion V had no orbital defenses, nor even energy weapons. The planet was subdued in seconds, conquered in minutes; it remained an enslaved mining world for the Naussican government for three hundred years, and by  _ Morai _ ’s native timezone neither the culture nor the population had recovered.

Fuck  _ that _ .

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” whispered Sylit. The captain shook her head and squeezed the girl’s shoulder.

“How much did you read,” asked Elvira, resigned.

“Enough.” Esther  _ did  _ understand a general ethical emphasis on agency and preventing imperialist intervention; but there were a lot of lives this ship had been willing to condemn to hundreds of years of terror and misery, for the sake of the  _ timeline. _ There were...things you had the moral obligation to undo, if you had the chance. Inaction made you complicit.

A thought occurred to her.

“So, uh.” She cleared her throat, glancing at the very large knife strapped to Elvira's thigh. “Do you have to kill me now, or…? If you lot have mindwipe technology you have to tell me so I can argue with you about ethics.”

“What?” Sylit looked scandalized. “No! You just can’t tell anyone. It could seriously impact the stability of the entire timestream.”

“And I’m expediting your reintegration before you  _ touch anything else.” _ Still, Elvira looked more worried than angry. “Esther... _ God, _ you’re so young. Be careful what you try to prevent. It can always be worse. Believe me when I say it can always be worse. You don’t know what rogue Temporal Affairs agents have created, trying to do the right thing. I hope you never do.”

“Sure.”

She didn’t think she’d convinced the Temporal Affairs captain, but Elvira seemed to understand that it was the best she was likely to get. “I’ll have Reintegration Matrix Seven prepped for you,” she told Sylit with another absent squeeze of the girl’s shoulder. “Let’s consider  _ tomorrow _ your first day on the job, Ensign. I hadn’t intended to throw you in the deep end like this.”

Esther protested, “Hey.”

“It  _ was _ intended as an insult, Lieutenant-Commander.”

Esther couldn’t really pretend that was unfair, but she muttered invectives against Elvira’s professionalism anyway as a jaded Sylit guided her back through the waiting room and down the corridor to the room of glowing pads.

“If this thing disintegrates me,” Esther began.

Sylit, who she suspected was just glad to be rid of her one way or the other, reached out and bounced her padd off Esther’s head. “We’re not disintegrating you. Shut up.”

Esther grinned at her as the small cadre of science officers took scans, tested measurements at their consoles, and calibrated the machine she was standing in.

“Can’t say you didn’t have an exciting first day,” she said.

Sylit managed the barest twitch of a smile. “Next time I’m asking Captain Matos to just let you die in space, ma’am.”

Esther blinked. “How would you even talk to...” Her thoughts cycled rapidly. Was it  _ impossible  _ that Sofia Matos was a Temporal Affairs agent sent to make sure their mission went smoothly? If so she was doing a piss-poor job of it. Unless this had all been according to some plan? Would she do that, with this kind of death toll? Not that Temporal Affairs would likely consider the death toll noteable. But she seemed so genuine, especially in her grief, and enough Starfleet officers remembered her from over the course of many years to make it unlikely. But then how—

The light of the reintegration matrix was already beginning to flare around her when the connections were made.

A Starfleet captain from the future who didn’t introduce herself with her surname, that odd moment of hesitation. Those dark eyes, the weary sigh that was suddenly ridiculously familiar. Like a  _ family resemblance. _ The strangeness of saving Esther’s life when her death had apparently been the result of random chance, the warning that Esther’s knowledge could damage the timestream…

_ “Oh,” _ she said out loud. “Son of a—”

* * *

“Oh,  _ good,” _ Aleksi breathed with relief as he stuck his head into the cargo area of the shuttle.

He was a little embarrassed by his fear, honestly, now that he saw Esther looking nonplussed but completely fine as she blinked at the sensor banks. Logically, of course, if anything had gone seriously wrong he would have been affected too, but…

Well, it was an  _ anomaly, _ wasn’t it? By definition, there was no way to know what an energy flare like that could have done.

“Esther!” He called. “Did you  _ see _ that?”

Esther held up a finger, then lowered it carefully.

“...Bitch,” she said, after a long moment.

Aleksi tilted his head slightly. “I really don’t like being called that, if you don’t mind. I know it’s an Aussie thing, but that specific word is...Esther?”

“What? Hey! Aleksi! Sorry, wasn’t talking to you. We better have been recording those readings!”

Oh good. She was back. Aleksi shrugged, not really  _ understanding _ the logic of calling a temporal anomaly a bitch but accepting it as a cultural thing, and ducked back into the pilot’s seat to buckle himself back in.

_ Someone _ had to take safety regulations seriously. It certainly wasn’t going to be Esther.

Proving his point, she vaulted into her seat and crossed her legs on the cushion, shaking her head sharply as she peered at her monitor. “Whoo.  _ Challenger, _ how long was I gone?”

_ “You’ve only been out there for an hour and a half,” _ said Atsa over the comms.  _ “What was that energy flare?” _

“It mucked up my sensors,” Aleksi told them all, taking a deep breath to calm himself more. “For a few seconds, they couldn’t pick up Esther’s presence. Well, I mean, they probably couldn’t pick up mine either, but I was looking for  _ yours _ .”

For some reason, she made a weird face at that. Before he could do more than cock his head, she flashed him an off-kilter grin and sat forward.

“Sorry, Captain, you can’t get rid of me that easy. I’d like to bring these readings back to Astrometrics, see if the  _ Challenger _ computers can parse something useful out of them. Unless there’s anything else we need to scan while we’re out here?”

_ “Negative, shuttle.” _ The response was professional, but warm.  _ “The captain says to go ahead and come home.” _

* * *

“I mean,” Larry allowed. “It’s a solution.”

Esther kicked her feet up on a cleared workstation, relaxing with a bowl of popcorn as they watched the projection on the main display. “Damn right it is, minion.”

Jae swiped a handful of Esther’s popcorn. “We were focusing on the wrong problem.”

Projected on all the monitors in Astrometrics, as well as various displays all around the ship, was a live feed from the interior of their shuttlecraft. 

First contact with Tidrion V. A first contact that was never meant to happen, not that anyone but Esther was aware of that tiny, insignificant little detail.

Jae was right. They  _ had _ been trying to solve the wrong problem, Esther more than anyone. They’d been so focused on trying to fix the connection issue, so tantalized by their near-successes, that they’d allowed themselves to lose sight of the actual goal—facilitating a face-to-face communication.

Getting kidnapped by the future was a hell of a rubber-duck debugging process, but Esther couldn’t pretend it hadn’t worked.

Onscreen, Aleksi docked the  _ Challenger _ shuttle with the Tidrion orbital space station.

Both sides had spent several hours, once Esther and Tisarr put together their joint proposal the previous morning, eagerly transmitting blueprints and schematics back and forth; both sides had modified their docking hatches to guarantee a secure seal that would keep their respective environments safely separated.

Slowly, the bulkheads opened, revealing the several vacuum-separated compartments of transparent material that would separate the two groups for their talks. On the other end, the spiny purple Tidrions oscillated their frill colors wildly, patterns that an informational packet and Atsa’s low commentary on the linked comm said were indicators of excitement, anxiety, and friendly intent.

Matos stepped forward, placing a hand on the plexiglass at the rear of the shuttle. Atsa and Yurovsky were at her left and right respectively, half a step behind, as Tidrion astronauts—it would almost be funny, using that old-fashioned term, if the situation were any less awe-inspiring—in spacewalking gear floated between the two, hooking up physical cables between both sides to connect the Earth-standard audio feeds they’d shipped over a few hours previous. No transmission nonsense this time around.

Esther wondered how Aleksi, out at the helm, must feel, being so close but not part of the proceedings; but he had such a sweet, sensitive nature that she didn’t think he was capable of jealousy in something like this. Something this important.

Esther tapped a piece of popcorn against the side of her bowl, lost in thought.

Every mission was this important. Potentially, at least. For want of a nail, right?

No one in their right mind would think that a slightly unsatisfactory first contact experience with a peaceful, non-warp society would end in hundreds of years of planetwide horror. Esther hadn’t dared check any of the other historical files; for all her bravado, she wasn’t a fan of predestination and she’d, you know, read fucking  _ books _ over the course of her life. Future knowledge was basically a prophecy, and bad things happened to protagonists who tried to cheat their way out of those.

Yeah, of course Esther was the protagonist here, why wouldn’t she be? Shut up. 

Though, that being said, the comic relief tended to be safer…

She’d been thinking about something.

The point was...the point was that she didn’t have enough time to do more than one focused search, and she’d made a call about how much future knowledge would even be worth it. She’d restrained herself to the Tidrion V information only partly out of necessity. Balancing that of course was, what if there was  _ good _ news? Knowing about it ahead of time might make her either more or less careful in the future, might lead to her obsessing over a specific incident until she overthought it into oblivion—or else taking something for granted and not putting in enough time or effort to actually make it happen. She could devastate a lot of lives that way. 

She was going to have to live with that. It was easy to say it was better to make mistakes and learn from them when you hadn’t just been slapped in the face with what a single mistake could do. A heads-up about the most important future screwups might have been nice. Maybe checking whether there was a section in Esther Hasdai’s historical file with the subheading ‘Untimely Death’ might have been worthwhile. Or in  _ Challenger _ ’s. 

Easy to say you should make your own mistakes and learn from them, when those mistakes only affected  _ you _ .

But there’d only been so much time. She’d had to choose—and she’d chosen this mission, here and now, today. Traded the chance at a general overview of things to be wary of in exchange for knowing exactly what the cost of failure here would be.

She winced at her own selfishness. Was she seriously questioning whether she’d done the right thing? Whether it was, what?  _ Worth _ it? How many people were on this planet, almost seven billion? Seven billion lives that were even now making plans to increase contact with Earth, maybe even trade, maybe tech exchanges...maybe the ability to call for help someday, if they needed it.

Maybe the Tidrions would listen, now, to the reports they were exchanging that warned of the Klingon Empire and its associates. At the very least, they had a fighting chance.

Of course that was worth it. Even in the worst-case scenario, she  _ couldn’t _ have done anything else. No one had the right to make that call.

“Esther?” A piece of popcorn bounced off her forehead in a friendly way; Jae and Larry looked concerned. “You okay?”

“I’m good,” she said, with maybe less of a cavalier attitude than normal. They still looked worried, and she flashed them a grin to take the edge off. “I agitated a temporal anomaly and I didn’t get  _ any _ fucking superpowers from it. Watch the first contact and let me mope in peace.”

Jae rolled her eyes; Larry still looked unconvinced, but respected the dismissal all the same.

When they’d both turned back to the monitor, Esther palmed an isometric chip from her boot and slipped it into a computer bank, muting the audio output. After a few moments, a long string of blue code began scrolling itself into existence on her display.

What? If Temporal Affairs didn’t want her to get her hands on that visual data homogenization routine, they shouldn’t have set up their recreation decks in a way that allowed her to hack nonessential bridge systems from a holographic slot machine. How the hell _ that _ worked she had no idea, but while she was fucking around with the timeline she should probably try to improve the future of Starfleet firewall technology while she was at it.

She set the computers to analyze the code for compatibility with  _ Challenger _ ’s systems, and sat back to watch as something a Tidrion representative said made Matos burst into delighted laughter.


End file.
